Maine Forest Service goes to NYC to help with cleanup

NEW YORK (NEWS CENTER)-- Sandy clean-up continues in and around New York City. Maine's Forest Service will be lending a hand. Governor LePage dispatched a team of nine rangers. They arrived on the dark streets of New York City...and joined the emergency management team to clean up and rebuild the city.

The team will be working out of Queens an area of the city hit the hardest by Sandy. This is part of a statewide agreement to help in the disaster relief.

The disaster relief team's major focus will be maintaining the hospitals and emergency services because a lot of their back up generators are stored in the basements and they got flooded by the surge of water from the storms.

Public Information Officer Kent Nelson with Maine's Incident Management team said, "It's hard to imagine there are shingles all over the road and some on the car from the roof. As we drove into the borough of Queens there were certain streets that had no lights and then others that did. Gas stations were all flagged off, there's no fuel here. So it's not quite a ghost town there are a few people out and about but it's definitely got an eerie feeling."

The team plans to help in the devastated areas for at least a week, but could extent it to two weeks.